October 2008 Archives

This a call for participation ... I'd like to see some of our courseware in iTunes U be opened up. Currently if you jump into our space you see exactly 10 open courses. I know there are instructors out there who have content they'd be willing to share openly.

I know we aren't going to have a space that resembles the Open University ... their mission is openness.

It wouldn't kill us to have something that at least resembles Arizona State ... they only have 12, but it is an interesting cross section of materials. Help me discover some new content from within PSU that could be placed in the Commons.

Originally I had composed this entry as an email that I was only going to send to a handful of people in and around ETS ... after I read it I thought it was better for the community to see and engage with.

I came across a post today by Michael Wesch that D'Arcy Norman linked to. Dr. Wesch is responsible for several of the best videos on youtube that challenge notions of connectedness and our students. As I read this I was thinking of the work we all do and how important it is that we do that work better. I was lucky enough to spend a little time talking with him at ELI in San Antonio last year and we just missed an opportunity to bring him to campus to be the keynote of our TLT Symposium.

There are lots of points in this post that strike a chord with me, in particular the notion that students are playing the "just getting by" game with great success. What is interesting to me are the assertions that they are winning it and we are letting them. He goes on to mention how he sees the need to embrace new thinking in our classrooms, the need to stop pretending there are walls separating real life from learning, and that the notions of learning and school elicit very different responses. Clearly he is a proponent of technology in teaching and learning contexts, but so should we -- our jobs are to design teaching and learning opportunities that appropriately take advantage of the landscape we (and our students) live in.

I just thought I'd share the link to the post and invite comments and thoughts.

I was doing some updates to my PSU Blog this morning -- mostly exporting old sites out of the MT 3 environment that we are looking to discontinue on October 15, 2008 (that was a hint). At any rate, I setup SFTP to PASS to move some images around and clean up my directories when I came across some of my old work.

When I say old work, I mean it. I came across a presentation I remember doing for an ETS Show and Tell back in 1999. At the time I was a World Campus Instructional Designer working on Electrical Engineering courses with my friend and colleague, Dr. Stu Kurtz. Stu and I both had a real interest in doing something very innovative ... and while I think Stu and I drove each other crazy, we really drove our collective bosses even crazier. At the time, Stu and I wanted to deliver a full on course experience, complete with a bunch of rich media files (sorta like enhanced podcasts without the RSS), real world scenarios, links to videos, and a whole bunch of executable Mathmatica activities. We had a huge problem getting all of this to work from a web browser, so I built an Authorware "launcher" application that linked it all together. I hate to say it was fun finding ways to work the web back in the day.

At any rate, the presentation is still sitting in my PASS space -- I always did hate PowerPoint, so I did my preso as a simple website. If you have any interest in what we were doing back in the day at the World Campus take a look ... a couple things to note ... the first is how much stuff we built for each and every course (help files, getting started guides, and other items) and the other is the use of First Class as the communication environment. Crazy stuff.

Brad Kozlek has been maintaing a simple spreadsheet for the last week or so detailing the adoption of the Blogs@PSU. Very encouraging numbers. Take a look at the graph below, or visit the actual google spreadsheet online:

This is my first post from Blogwriter Lite on my iPhone. It has some limitations -- no photo uploading on the unpaid lite version is a deal breaker for me. You also can't edit the post once it has been written (as far as I can tell).